ABSTRACT
Indigenous film-making is often understood as rewriting, revisioning and ‘talking back’ to those legacies of misrepresentation emerging from colonial and more contemporary forms of racism. These misrepresentations include narratives about the dying (or disappearing) Indian, the violent (or noble) Māori, multiple forms of Eskimo orientalism and negative stereotyping of Aboriginal Australians. Yet Indigenous peoples know that our filmmaking is much more than a vehicle for revising wrongs and involves a sometimes anarchic, creative and disruptive force that affirms Indigenous ways of being, on Indigenous terms. Indigenous filmmakers in the 21st century now benefit from the creative and critical legacies left by those working from the early 1960s to the late 1990s. An emerging body of film scholarship by Indigenous and non-Indigenous authors also has a role to play in shaping understandings of this increasingly global Indigenous creative movement. But how do we critically address the tensions embedded in the category ‘Indigenous film-making’ that includes the localised and site-specific nature of Indigenous knowledge systems and practices and the globalised technology that is film? This chapter offers a site-specific critical reflection, drawing from a recent example of Indigenous film-making from my own cultural context, Aotearoa/New Zealand. The film pioneers emerging from this location are Barry Barclay and Merata Mita. Their influence is cited in the international scholarship related to Indigenous film-making. Yet the problem of operationalising concepts Indigenous to one place, in the context of another’s, is a vexed task indeed. Following the work of Barclay I argue that Indigenous film behaves differently, it carries sovereign forms of Indigenous insistence that require critically-inflected responses from scholars interested in Indigenous film. This chapter advances a situated approach to this global category in the hope of provoking critical and creative conversations about Indigenous film-making today.
